WWJD? BKBTRPAOTD II

So previously I said, "In a Grahamsian scheme, we easily identify conservative American values with the holiness that comes from being a Christian and that is no mere coincidence." By that I don't mean that Christians prefer Republicans to Democrats because Republicans are conservative and Democrats are liberal. It may be that a certain type of Christian does prefer voting Republican, but I am only partly concerned with that. I mention this because it may be too easy to dismiss the premise if one reads it as just another complaint about the dominance of Evangelicalism by the Religious Right.

What I mean by identifying holiness with conservative American values is the tendency to see Christianity as a source of moderation or as THE basis for civic virtue (I'm talking to you believers in a Judeo-Christian ethic). It's the lie that equates being a good Christian with being a good citizen. A Christian is ultimately a good, but not as a citizen, rather as part of a people who are led by the Spirit to follow Jesus' example and live as His body to reveal us for what we are: destroyers. Where we are confronted by the Word- not necessarily the word- our economics are revealed as deadly, we see our patriotism is murder, our religion is exposed as a system of exclusion and dominance. If we're not... well then, we're not.

Of course my own voting preferences are probably clear. I think John McCain is a reactionary militant who would get the US into more military conflicts were he president. Seriously, make Georgia a part of NATO so we can go to war with Russia? That's the benefit of his decades of experience? That may play well to the majority of Americans who haven't seen a war they didn't love, and as such may really be the benefit of his years of experience, though it doesn't change the assessment that he's the guy fishing with dynamite. I've already mentioned I prefer Obama for the iota of difference that may come about in terms of policy, but don't confuse that for what I mean here by politics, and don't think one is conservative and one is liberal in relation to what I said before. Barack is as bourgeois as McCain. I do think Barack is a more thoughtful leader and find him more sympathetic but am also very mindful that expecting much more is an ideological trap.

If Jesus is our model and the communities of the New Testament are examples of the type of communities from that model, then the religious is political. Followers of Jesus are by virtue of their leader, political. I don't mean in the theatrical sense in which religion and politics are broadly taken (a sense that seems perfectly designed to undermine the possibility of religion or politics). I mean in the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophetic model wherein the Word of God confronts a people committed to being a nation of the world rather than a people of God.

What does that mean? In short, it means if you are going to be a follower of Jesus you are going to be political, but only to the degree that Jesus was political- only to the degree that the religious and political leaders of the day found him a threat and killed him.